alt Hacker News> Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable or seriously thinks their code is a moat.
You'd be surprised! Among non-software management types, they often think of the code as extremely valuable IP and a trade secret. I'm a CTO and I've made comments before to non/less technical peers about how the code (generally speaking) isn't that big of a secret, and I routinely get shocked expressions. In one case the company almost passed on a big contract because it required disclosure of the source code (with an NDA). When I told them that was a silly reason and explained why, they got it, but the old way of thinking still permeates and is a hard habit to break.
Edit: Fixed errant copy pasta error. Glad that wasn't a password :-)
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You're right, I guess maybe I mean in any serious actionable way. Senior, non technical people leave plenty of money on the table by thinking they're protecting something valuable or they have some kind of secret sauce. It's all silly is what I meant to say, and digging into the technicalities of whether your code is truly copyrightable is kind of pointless. It's all vibes.
Maybe LLM coding agents change the equation by making it much easier to adapt and use foreign and probably incomplete code. Getting you closer to competing with the original authors in a shorter amount of time than generating new code from scratch.
Totally agreed.
I work in M&A. Nearly every lawyer, accountant, investor, and software business owner thinks their code is solely valuable and a trade secret. I find it hilarious and try to be as diplomatic as possible about why it's not. They also willfully will give their client list to a potential acquirer but get super cagey they moment a third party provider asks for their code to be scanned.
This argument easily gets shut down when I asked why, Twitch, a $1B business didn't crater to their competition when their full codebase was leaked.